The funny thing is that she lives in the city with what is probably the densest big-church concentration in Canada.
L.Lagomorph beat me to it, but I was going to ask for some explanation. As a rule they put big churches closer than 375km to the car park.
What would you do-o-o-o for a Klondike Bar?
13 miles in, spend 2 days catching giant sunfish and small bass, then 13 miles out. Rolling to steep California mountains. Got a blister and lost the toenail. Never been hiking since. Took the mountain bike the next year.
I don’t drive, so aside from public transportation, the question, for me, isn’t “How far would you walk for something you want?” but “Do you want it at all?” So in line with that, yes, I’d walk quite far. Really, it’s all a matter of time; if I had hours to kill I’d spend hours walking somewhere but who has that kind of time?
I drive a Jeep, so I never take it farther than I’m willing to walk home. And I always try to have comfortable shoes or boots.
Walking is about the only exercise I do. Most of the stuff that gets classified under “sports” gives me a rash; add “competitive” in front and I break out in hives.
In my second year in college I only had one course, so I walked back and forth from my house. That’s 10km, uphill going in and downhill coming back. If I detoured via downtown it pushed the number up to 15km.
That same year I entered the Cursa Corte Inglés with my Sporty Cousins. It’s 10km. I walked it in 1h0min50sec. They ran it but it took longer (and yeah, I still pull their legs about it).
I’ve never taken part in a Javierada, which from my home town is an 80km, 2day walk. It’s a local pilgrimage held every March in honor of St Francis Xavier. I’ve been to Santiago but not walked el Camino (my brothers and SiL have).
I have walked up to several mountains in or near the Pyrinees, including Atxerito (north side of course) and Mesa de los Tres Reyes (several times). The summer I was camping with the school’s mountain club, our idea of rest involved walking only 28km (the big pond at the river was 7km away, we went morning and afternoon).
Mind you, most of those weren’t to get any physical items. I just wanted to walk.
When I was in New Zealand I wanted to go and have a look at an old gold-mining ghost town. Well, and have a nice hike as well. From the map I reckon I walked about 32 miles that day, with a lot of up and down too.
This is an instructive thread … mostly in terms of showing what people evidently consider a long walk. To me, a walk doesn’t enter the “hmm, kinda long” category until it is at lest 10 miles. (And I know, because I use my handheld GPS unit for such things.)
I would gladly walk 10 miles for something I wanted; 20 miles for something I wanted A LOT.
In fact, I would walk 10 miles because what I wanted was … to walk 10 miles.
I feel compelled to add now that while I once walked over 5.5 miles for some nooky, I have also walked farther than that against my will. In the Army we did 12-mile ruck marches a few times a year. They were not fun for me.
My father (and a lot of other people) walked from the beaches of Normandy to the Rhine River where he was prevented from walking any further by a German artilliary shell. But even that walk pales beside The Great March in 1934-35 when Mao Zedung led his army on a 6,000 mile march from one end of China to another in order to regroup his forces during the civil war.
All day. For something super fabulously splenderific I’d walk for even longer. This of course doesn’t include having to haul some heavy or bulky thing with me.
My distance-walking story, although it doesn’t have much to do with wanting something, except to get home and go to bed.
Picture it: it’s 1980 and I’m an exchange college student in Tokyo (although I was 30 at the time) staying with a Japanese family. I have dispensation to stay out late (i.e. after 10:30 p.m.) one night per week, for which I picked Fridays most of the time. Anyway, on this occasion I was late getting back, and I missed the last train that went the last 3 stops to my station (Ikebukuro to Akabane, if you know the area). I didn’t have cab fare, and in those days the ATMs closed down around 11:00 p.m. for some stupid reason (for all I know, they may still do so). So I decided to walk, it should only have been an hour or so. But…
The streets in that part of town are not straight, and I didn’t have a map. Without realizing it, I started veering in the wrong direction. I kept walking and walking, but eventually had no idea where I was. I got so far out into the exurbs that I saw fields of cabbages growing. Finally I came upon a police box, and the kindly officers there pointed me in the right direction. I got home about 6:00 a.m., which would have scandalized my Japanese family if they had been awake at the time. Total walking time about 6 hours, at top speed, so I figure between 20 and 24 miles. Fortunately this was late in the spring so the weather was nice.
I would have been better off just sitting next to the train station and waiting for the first trains in the morning, which I think started about 5:00 or 5:30. A lesson which, fortunately, I have never had to make use of.
Roddy